Updated March 16, 2009: Somebody updated these links with the 4.0 version (which kind of defeats the purpose of having these links so I’m not sure what they were thinking) but they’re back to the 3.x version now.

Hey, there’s a new version of Application Verifier in town, and guess what? Standard User Analyzer doesn’t like it. ACT 5.0.3 (the latest publicly available version) is hard coded to look for versions 3.2 through 3.5, so the brand new version 4.0 kind of leaves this tool in a lurch.

It’s also a mystery to me why the #1 web hit on live.com for Application Verifier leads to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=bd02c19c-1250-433c-8c1b-2619bd93b3a2&DisplayLang=en, which is a, “We are sorry, the page you requested cannot be found” page, which helpfully has search results from the same search engine, which helpfully has a #1 web hit of the same unhelpful page. Seriously? Did we just not pay attention to the fact that we should have kept this page and forwarded, since people don’t want to have to guess the GUID for the new version? A search for Application Verifier 4.0 brings up the desired download as the #2 hit, so all is not lost (just most).

But the fact that you can eventually find this incredibly useful and important tool if you try hard enough still doesn’t help fans of Standard User Analyzer (which are many). So, until we release ACT 5.5 (which support Application Verifier 4.0), we posted the 3.x versions again in a super-secret hidden location so you can still download them from us instead of from a random source. Unfortunately, we didn’t include fwlinks in the product so we could just update these links and you wouldn’t have to read this here, an omission we have already fixed.

So, here’s where you can get the 3.x versions of application verifier:

I loaded Application Verifier 3.x with ACT 5.0 Application Compatibility loaded on Windows Vista Business SP1 and ran one of our application to test and got BSOD pointing to ks.sys. I have a mini dump file that I could send. Any ideas on this?

AppVerifier, and ACT, run completely in user mode, so you’re most likely looking at a coincidence. (Driver verifier, on the other hand, is known not to get along well with ks.sys.)

I found a number of hits for ks.sys on Microsoft.com – have you tried any of them? Looks like this is the AVStream driver – have you done anything different with audio or video drivers that may be affecting this?